BioWare tease new sci-fi IP Anthem – full reveal tomorrow

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BioWare have teased their new IP, Anthem [official site], at EA’s E3 press conference. We know very little about it, but it’ll use the Frostbite engine, it’s sci-fi and it involves POWER ARMOUR. Here’s the plot, based on what I know from the teaser trailer: Humanity lives behind a great big wall, hiding from MONSTERS, and occasionally nipping out in their supersuits to biff those monsters.

Let’s call it Attack On Titanfall then, eh?

This, presumably, is the long-rumoured Project Dylan. There will be a full reveal at the Microsoft conference tomorrow, which means it’ll almost certainly be coming to PC. I’ll bring you all the news as it happens.

Maybe its just me, but im not feeling the ‘Bob Dylan of video games’ vibe at all. I smell a bog standard fps, maybe with Titalfall-style robots or a Destiny-style shared social space.

Guess we’ll find out in a couple of hours at the gameplay reveal, but my money is on it being the ‘S-Club 7 of video games’. inoffensive and arguably fun, but soulless, derivative, and focus tested by suits to appeal to as broad a spectrum as possible

I want to give it a chance because we don’t have enough sci-fi themed games like this. But it sure has a lot to prove now, after the mess that was Andromeda. Not the same studio, I know, but the same overlords.

Right? We’re so close to the perfect sci-fi game I can feel it in the air…or something. XCX was a demonstration of frustration, reveling in what could have been with that excellent world design was maddening. Most games have nailed aspects of sci-fi but never get the world to be ‘livable’ in any real sense. I’m just waiting for a game that takes the best of like Xenogears and Red Dead Redemption, plops you in an amazing and dangerous world and lets go of the reigns. Solid gameplay and self-motivated discovery with tight well scripted story bits. Mass Effect is probably the closest so far, but still felt ‘video-gamey’ in every sense. Corridors and no repercussions for choice has been too much of a mainstay in today’s market.

Given Kotaku’s recently look into “what happened with Andromeda” layed a lot of the blame on Frostbite being terrible for anything other than FPS games…the engine announcement doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

I mean, it sort of did: it said all the writing was done very late in the game. When people are forced to churn out words they tend to be bad, especially when they are forced to churn them out in all the constrained ways that is normal for video games.

Also, like, the industry has long been calling Bioware’s mediocre writing “great,” so I don’t think they were particularly incentivized or concerned to push themselves in that area.

What I’m mainly interested in, is why 1) they chose a barely out of teenager status protagonist instead of a battle-hardened adult like Shepard for the player character, and 2) why so much of the writing for that character read like a Young Adult novel.

It would be fascinating to know the average age of the team that wrote that dialogue. None of it read like adult-experienced dialog to me, but maybe that’s just because I’m an old fart gamer now. The previous ME series didn’t feel this way to me.

See, I really want more in the way of sci-fi RPGs. I should be all-in with this. But this doesnt strike me as a place to pin my hopes – it strikes me as those hopes being systematically dashed. I know it’s only a teaser, but my god, it is one painfully uninspired teaser.

I didnt even feel any reason to jump on the anti-Andromeda bandwagon, cus for all the legitimacy of the common complaints I felt the public reaction was still way too much… but I feel considerably less charitable after seeing this. It’s like they laid off imagination itself…